Jindal: DOJ suit no closer to conclusion - More Common Core consternation - ED ends 'What Works' site for teachers

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JINDAL: DOJ SUIT NO CLOSER TO CONCLUSION: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Department of Justice gave differing accounts of how close they are to resolving a lawsuit that’s become a cause for congressional Republicans who favor school choice. In a letter Tuesday to House Speaker John Boehner, the Justice Department said the state had agreed to hand over information about the racial effects of vouchers. Read the letter: http://bit.ly/15rhJpT

--But Jindal said in a statement that was “nothing more than a PR stunt.” “While attempting to rebrand its legal challenge as merely an attempt to seek information about implementation of the scholarship program, the administration’s real motive still stands — forcing parents to go to federal court to seek approval for where they want to send their children to school,” Jindal said. Pro Education’s Caitlin Emma has the full story: http://politi.co/15ri6AE

--Conservative school choice advocates, including Sen. Lamar Alexander, also blasted the letter. “This letter offers no explanation to low-income parents and students in Louisiana as to why the Department of Justice would use its enormous discretion in choosing enforcement actions to bully the state of Louisiana and bury its successful voucher program in legal proceedings and paperwork,” he said in a statement. “Instead, the department makes the absurd claim that filing a lawsuit seeking to bar the state from awarding vouchers to poor students shouldn’t suggest it opposes the program.”

--Ads against the lawsuit began running Monday. “The federal government in Washington’s out of control; now they want to run our schools,” Jindal says in the ad. “The know-it-alls in Washington think they know better than Louisiana parents.” Watch the ad: http://bit.ly/16YqF4t

MORE COMMON CORE CONSTERNATION — Gov. Scott Walker said Tuesday that Wisconsin should have more rigorous academic standards than the Common Core State Standards, which his state was one of the first to adopt in 2010. “I’d like to have Wisconsin have its own unique standards that I think can be higher than what’s been established and what’s been talked about at the national level,” Walker told reporters. Fellow Republicans … said they were puzzled by Walker’s pronouncement. Wisconsin State Journal: http://bit.ly/1gYas0B

OUTREACH STARTS SOON ON INCOME-BASED REPAYMENT — An overlooked element of President Barack Obama’s higher education plan: informing struggling student loan borrowers about income-based repayment programs. E-mails will go out starting next month, the New York Times reports: “We think there are lots of people who could benefit from our income-based repayment programs but haven’t signed up, and we want to get to them before they default,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the newspaper. “The challenge is getting the word out.” The story: http://nyti.ms/16Yuk27

GOOD MORNING AND HAPPY WEDNESDAY. Welcome to Morning Education. Today I’m wishing a very happy birthday to my dad, who led me into the news business. Although I’m a little sorry that — unlike Sen. Ted Cruz during his multi-hour speech Tuesday — he never read me “Green Eggs and Ham” from the Senate floor. Keep in touch: lnelson@politico.com and @libbyanelson. And follow us at @morning_edu and @POLITICOPro.

KLINE AND OTHER CHAIRMEN: DON’T CHANGE 90/10 -- A group of key House Republicans called the requirement that for-profit colleges get no more than 90 percent of their income, with veterans’ benefits excluded, from the federal government “a flawed formula” that has singled out the sector and led to unintended consequences. Student and veteran advocates and some Congressional Democrats, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have pushed to include veterans’ benefits in the calculations because they say excluding them provides colleges with a motive to exploit veterans.

“Military benefits are fundamentally different forms of student assistance than federal financial aid,” the chairmen of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Committee on Armed Services, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and the Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity wrote in a letter to the Senate Committee on Appropriations. If fraud exists, it should be dealt with through existing rules and regulations, they said: “There is no lack of oversight of the higher education industry.”

Rep. John Kline, Buck McKeon, Jeff Miller and Bill Flores were reacting to a provision in the Senate’s defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2014 that aimed to change the 90-10 rule to include veterans’ benefits. If Congress wants to take up that issue, they said, it should be in the Higher Education Act. Read the letter: http://politico.pro/15rq7R2

ANNOUNCING LATER THIS MORNING — Duncan will announce the Broad Prize for Urban Education, which goes to the most improved school district and comes with a $1 million award. The finalists: Corona-Norco Unified School District in Riverside County, Calif., the Houston Independent School District, Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina, and the San Diego Unified School District. Duncan will make the announcement at the Library of Congress at 11 a.m. http://bit.ly/15CqSMH

GAINFUL EMPLOYMENT RULEMAKING CONTINUES — Negotiators will hold a conference call at 1 p.m. to discuss a department approval process for vocational programs and programs at for-profit colleges “to prevent the establishment of programs that are likely to perform poorly.” More pre-screening — rather than punishing programs after the fact — was a hot topic at the rulemaking session earlier this month. http://1.usa.gov/1dXxJ3Y

GAO: BUREAU OF INDIAN EDUCATION NEEDS TO SHAPE UP — The bureau needs to improve its management capacity and controls, the Government Accountability Office found in a report issued Tuesday. The bureau gets about $850 million per year to educate 41,000 students living on or near reservations. But the GAO found areas where the agency could improve, including letting schools know in a more timely fashion whether they’ve made adequate yearly progress. Stephanie Simon has more for Pros: http://politico.pro/1gYh27t

WE’RE NOT LACKING FOR COLLEGE RANKINGS — The Hechinger Report takes a look at the public, private and nonprofit ways of ranking colleges as the Education Department prepares its own: “At a time when students and their families are demanding to know what they’re getting for their mounting investments in higher education, several foundations and research centers are already working on new ways to show them. Even some universities and colleges themselves — reasoning that it’s better to come up with their own ratings than have them imposed by someone else — are quietly working on new ways to gauge what graduates learn and earn, though many remain reluctant so far to make the results public. … For all of this activity, there’s evidence that students and their families don’t rely as much on rankings as university administrators seem to fear. Rankings are a mediocre 12th on a list of 23 reasons for selecting a college students gave in an annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute.” The story: http://bit.ly/1gYpGTs

ED ENDS ‘WHAT WORKS’ SITE FOR TEACHERS — Resources from the website, which offered lesson plans and videos for evidence-based teaching practices, will live on somewhere else. But the department doesn’t have the money to produce new material, according to a statement: “The ED office managing Doing What Works did not have sufficient funding to continue operating the website and producing new material, but we are working to place the archive of resources on another site for educators to use. The decision to suspend the site was not a result of sequestration cuts. We do continue to produce Practice Guides.”

BE AN AGRICULTURE PRO: Pro Agriculture, the second of three new Pro policy areas launching this fall, will debut on Wednesday, Oct. 2 and will feature breaking news and inside analysis from our best-in-the-business reporters. To learn more about Pro Agriculture, e-mail info@politicopro.com or call (703) 341-4600.

REPORT ROLL CALL: New America Foundation releases district-by-district data on pre-K spending: http://bit.ly/1gYoCif … Digital Learning Now!, Getting Smart and The Learning Accelerator release the latest installment of the DLN Smart Series, a white paper that reflects feedback from education leaders, field practitioners and researchers on how to effectively adopt a blended learning model for college- and career-readiness: http://bit.ly/UT5ozP. … New report from the Institute of Education Sciences’ Regional Education Laboratory on the FAIR and FCAT reading exams in Florida: http://1.usa.gov/16YFeou. … IES literature survey on alternative methods for calculating value-added in teacher performance: http://1.usa.gov/1gYoRtJ.

MORNING ED'S SYLLABUS

--Newark superintendent Cami Anderson faces a torrent of public disapproval despite support from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The Star-Ledger: http://bit.ly/1gYpN1j